AUSTIN, Texas, March 17, (RTRS): “Saturday Night’’ seems like such a natural idea for a documentary — charting the week of writing and preparation that go into an episode of “Saturday Night Live’’ — that it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been made before. James Franco got the idea after hosting the show in September 2008, and exec producer Lorne Michaels gave him the go-ahead to bring in cameras and record an entire week.
The documentary should do well on the fest circuit, but will probably find the most success on DVD with “SNL’’ fans.
The show Franco captures was hosted by John Malkovich shortly before Christmas 2008.
The documentary does a fantastic job at illustrating the stress, work and long hours devoted to making something that’s gone in 90 minutes. It’s a riveting and often hilarious film, shedding a light on the creative process at “SNL’’ like nothing else.
The documentary is structured as simply as possible with title cards demarcating the different daily tasks for the cast and crew: Monday is pitch day, when everyone gathers with that week’s host in Michaels’ office to suggest sketches.

The suggestions are alternately funny and lacking, and you get a sense right away of the dynamic at play when it comes to getting an idea out there.
Much of the action of a given scene in the film is intercut with a cast member talking about their process or history with the show with stunning honesty, as when Will Forte says that the pitch meetings are “half bulls —’’ and that he has no idea what he’ll suggest that week. (The sketch he winds up pitching makes it into the script but is cut after the dress rehearsal.)
Franco’s smart to let the natural action of the creative process dictate the drama and humor. Though he’s in several scenes as an interviewer, he’s mostly content to let the cameras roll as writers bat around ideas, find good ones and get stuck on bad ones. Tuesday is writing day, with staffers working through the night to get their scripts in for the Wednesday table read. Their 50 submitted sketches are trimmed to nine.
Thursday and Friday are filled with rehearsals, construction and the filming of interstitials for certain sketches. Then it’s dress rehearsal on Saturday night and a live show at 11:30 ET, and we’re off to the races.
It’s impossible to get a sense of the scope of the show’s 35-year history in a 90-minute doc, but Franco covers some good ground by chatting with members about their comedy training and with a producer about how people invariably think the cast from their childhood years was the best. “SNL’’ is constantly in a state of reinvention. For instance, Casey Wilson, who has a prominent role in part of the doc, was axed more than a year ago. Yet “Saturday Night’’ is wonderful for the way it shows just how much of the work stays the same.

Utterly disposable but diverting, “MacGruber’’ manages to spin feature-length product out of an idea that few would try expanding beyond a “Saturday Night Live’’ skit.
Unlikely to catch fire at the box office, it leaves unanswered the question of whether star Will Forte will be able to break out and carry comedies on his own. Screening at the South By Southwest Film Festival in what director Jorma Taccone said was a not-quite-locked cut, the 84-minute movie stretches the material about as far as it can go.
Forte plays the title character, who doesn’t pull off nearly as many science-fair tricks with household implements as his similarities to TV’s “MacGyver’’ would suggest. (The movie’s funniest nod to this schtick has Forte preparing for a mission by arming himself with strategically stashed pushpins and dental floss.)
The team of “SNL’’ vets behind the film is less interested in one TV show than in mocking a decade’s worth of action/adventure cliches, as MacGruber gets called out of his self-imposed South American exile to hunt the villain who killed his bride on their wedding day.
He assembles his crackerjack team in a quick “putting the band back together’’ montage — but things go awry, and he must make do with only a woman who would rather be writing pop ballads (Kristen Wiig, whose performance is the sharpest thing here) and a still-green soldier (Ryan Phillippe) who idolized MacGruber until he actually had to work with this incompetent, cowardly man.
Screenwriters Forte, Taccone and John Solomon fixate on some amusing bits of ‘80s nostalgia (the hero’s mullet, of course, and his attachment to the removable car stereo in his Miata), but also invest too much time in lazy gags like repeating the nearly-a-naughty-word name of Val Kilmer’s villain (Dieter Von Cunth) ad nauseam.